Banking institutions can deliver various statements to their clients and, in particular, statements in computerized form or statements in paper form.
Various display formats exist for computerized statements, depending, in particular, on the issuing banking institution.
Generally speaking, a computerized bank statement has a certain amount of information relating to the transactions conducted out by the client, commonly presented in the form of lines, each representing a particular transaction.
This information, for example, has the date of the transaction, the amount thereof, and a reference for the merchant with whom the transaction was conducted.
One disadvantage in these computerized statements is due to the fact that they do not have detailed information about the merchant.
As a matter of fact, the reference, or identification of the merchant is most often incomplete and useless to the client who wishes to have details about the transaction in question, especially when they consult their statement a certain period of time after the transaction, or when the transaction took place in a country using a different set of characters from that of the client (for example, a French client in China). This reference corresponds to the identification of the merchant which said merchant records at the moment when they activate their payment terminal, and may correspond, for example, to the name of the merchant, their company name, or at best to the name of their business.
These statements also have the disadvantage of not providing any information about the transaction in and of itself, i.e., the subject goods or services of this transaction.
The same difficulties are encountered with paper statements.